


Time And Again

by BluesfeedUnsolved



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Insecure Logic | Logan Sanders, Logic | Logan Sanders Angst, Logic | Logan Sanders-centric, Minor Character Death, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Acceptance, Self-Doubt, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28322094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BluesfeedUnsolved/pseuds/BluesfeedUnsolved
Summary: In an attempt to create a new set of schedules for the sides, Logan finds himself stuck in a time loop.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Logic | Logan Sanders, Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders & Logic | Logan Sanders
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34
Collections: TSS Fanworks Collective





	Time And Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is my secret santa gift for the wonderful Rain! Happy holidays, Rain!
> 
> Warnings:
> 
> Minor swearing  
> Implied/Referenced character death  
> Self-doubt
> 
> Please let me know if there is something else that I should add.

Dark rooms with doors that locked from the outside were rather annoying, in Logan’s opinion (not that anyone asked for it). He supposed that it came with the territory of being imaginary and wandering around someone’s mind, but that did not make his satisfaction mandatory. He knew that Virgil’s room was dark, the darkest of them all, and he knew this quite well. However, for the life of him, he could not understand why someone would want to stay in a dark room on purpose. 

He sat and he waited. For something, for anything.

God in hell, was Logan bored. No Remus to tell annoying and unnecessary statements, or jokes as he preferred to call them. No light. And only a set amount of time on his hands.

Logan had a plan for everything, or so he liked to perpetuate. All of that came crashing down when the flashlight he brought went out several minutes ago.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that things went downhill much before that, and all he could do was be stuck in remembering just how he got into this mess.

\---

“A bit of the Imagination,” they said. “It will be no problem at all,” they said. Logan was once again reminded of how much he hated the Imagination and how much he hated everyone else. Unfortunately, it was the only way to set his plan into motion:

Create a series of trial and error scenarios in which he could test his new scheduling plans. He had a small remote with all of the usual amenities such as pause, play, rewind, etc. 

Everyone else had the schedules and looked them over many times (Logan checked). There was not a hair out of place and soon there would not be a person out of place once he worked out any minor errors with the schedules.

Logan would go around and follow everyone else individually to see if it was fitting their needs and time management skills. Virgil was the first one up.

He walked up to his room reading and reading and rereading the schedule. His eyes were hooked onto every word. There was no room for error, despite him having made sure that there would be; it was only necessary given the group he was working with. If all went well and easy, they could implement it as soon as possible. And Logan would get his much needed applause for cracking a code no one else had been able to make a dent in for the past several years. While he didn’t consider himself an optimist or a narcissist, he could hear cheers of his name in the near future. 

Logan’s infallible margin of error should have accounted for the lovely introduction between his face and the sewage drain-like crevice outside of Virgil’s room, but alas; despite what Logan preached, he was not perfect. He was so not perfect that his gingerly crafted remote fell down the crevice. He sighed and reached his hand into it. All of his planning had also not forecasted the need for a flashlight.

It wasn't water that he felt when he stuck his hand in. It was a slimy black void filled with a jelly-like fluid. Nothing could hide down there for it wouldn't be able to breathe. And if that was the case, then why did Logan feel something tickle his hand? Like a tail, a tentacle, a claw? Something pulsing with electricity.

He pulled his hand out, remote safely inside. Along with it came liquid computer glitches that stuck to his hand, refusing to let go. In between a blink, he did not see a hand, but circuitry and wires. Another blink and not only was his hand as normal as ever, but the crevice was gone and replaced by a smooth black wall. As if it was never there in the first place.

“You okay there, L?” Logan looked up and saw Virgil standing in his doorway, watching him reach for something that wasn’t there and cradling a small mechanical device. Luckily, he had seen weirder (read: Remus).

“Yes. Yes, I’m as fine as ever. I just tripped,” said Logan.

“The ground is smooth.” said Virgil, eyeing him.

“Reading.”

Virgil heard all he needed too. “Yeah, so about the schedules. What do I have to do?”

Logan dusted himself off and rose (with a hand from Virgil). He quickly inspected the remote from the corner of his eye. Nothing seemed off. It was whole and the same soft black color that he had chosen. 

“Are you sure that you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, Virgil. I’m always fine.” He handed him the schedule and noted the purple highlighted sections. “This schedule is your guide. I should have written down and scheduled everything, so there should not be any issues. We are going to quickly study the schedule and see if it works for you. If that means that we must do the activities listed on it, that is fine. If you believe that you can guess the appropriate amount of time for each task, that is less fine, but is still acceptable. Now, please look it over quickly because I would like to move this along in conjunctio--”

“Logan. Please. Stop. Talking.” Logan didn’t even realize that he was pinching the bridge of his nose as he said this with a deep sigh. “Let’s just see what you have down and then we’ll run through it.” He muttered, “And I thought I was anxious.”

Virgil looked it over and thought about it for six minutes, only to appease Logan, who was looking closer and closer to himself; he agreed that everything was on the schedule. The two moved on and began to follow the schedule.

With the first task (analyzing conversations from the past week), they were incredibly precise. Logan even silently cheered at how well he knew everyone else’s time management skills. This task was only meant to take up twenty minutes. The next was to tell Roman which ideas were realistic and which ones were dumb (Virgil’s words, not Logan’s, though he didn’t entirely disagree with the sentiment), which Virgil claimed could take hours. Logan scheduled an hour and a half. Taking in time to locate Roman and get to him, this would hopefully be another two minutes. 

They got to Roman’s door uneventfully. Unfortunately, the events were to begin after this because Roman was not there.

“I thought that you said he’d be in his room,” said Virgil.

“It appears I was mistaken. He’s usually here at this time.” Logan growled. 

Virgil’s eyes widened and then rolled far away. “Why don’t we just take a break from this schedule stuff? We’ll figure it out when Roman comes--”

“No.” Logan hated that he stamped his foot. Through gritted teeth, he said, “We are doing this now because this is the scheduled time and we are not breaking that.”

Someone needed to tell Logan to stop closing his eyes at the most inopportune moments because Roman’s door was no longer there. Instead of a pristine red wood befitting a gaudy mansion, it was as if someone painted a pitch black ink over the wall.

“The fuck?” said Virgil. As he moved closer to the wall, it turned more purple. It also began to bore a pattern. It looked as though someone smashed their computer screen and a bug had entered the system. Virgil squinted into it. 

“Should we touch it?” Neither of them wanted to be the one to do it.

“You guys are always telling me to be brave and lighten up; I’ll do it.” He began to reach for it, but it got there first. A swarm of a purple system glitch grabbed his hand. From his hand to his wrist to the rest of him, it slowly spread. “Logan?”

Logan watched with wide eyes as Virgil dematerialized into a sea of hazy system glitches; he watched it want more. And that was when it rounded on him and he could do nothing more than let it swallow him whole. There was nothing after that.

However, Logan awoke on the ground right outside of Virgil’s room. It looked exactly the same as it did a mere thirty or so minutes ago, though he noted that there was no crevice. Out of the corner of his eye, a small bubbling glitch-like light caught it. He felt an overwhelming sense of something behind him, but when he turned his head, there was nothing. The remote was still in his hand, perfectly intact as if nothing had ever happened to it: no crevice and no getting swallowed whole by something that probably escaped from Remus’ room.

“You okay there, L?” Virgil was once again standing in his doorway, hiding a laugh from the sight of the normally infallible Logan, splayed out on the ground. 

“Yes. Yes, I--I’m as fine as ever. I just tripped?” said Logan slowly.

“The ground is smooth and you don’t sound so sure.” he said, a playful smile growing on his face.

“I’m very sure. I’m always sure.” He paused, unsure of how to say this without sounding paranoid or like Roman hyped up on too many Disney movies. “Weren’t we just talking?”

“No.”

“No? I could have sworn that we were just going through your schedule.”

“Nope, we weren’t. Need a hand?” Logan appreciated the gesture, but not the words that came with it. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re not usually so clumsy or acting so  _ weird _ . Do you spend time with Roman or something?”

Logan stood there and stared at Virgil dumbfounded. “My apologies. I must have spent too long in the Imagination. I could have sworn that we were just talking and then we suddenly weren’t.”

“If something’s wrong, we can do the schedule stuff later. It’s really okay.”

“No. We’re doing it now. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. I am fine.” Logan’s clipped voice was not enough to cut Virgil’s eyebrow raise.

Virgil held up his hands in mock defeat. He took the schedule and scanned it, though he kept one of his eyes on Logan in front of him: he fidgeted. His eyes were moving back and forth as if he were quickly reading, despite there being nothing there. Virgil couldn’t pretend that he didn’t notice the way Logan stared out of the corner of his eyes. Though he tried bringing it up again, he’d probably tear his head off.

“Let’s just see what you have down and then we’ll run through it,” Virgil sighed. 

Logan felt like he was waiting forever for Virgil to read the goddamn paper. He moved his eyes into Virgil’s room. It was darker than he remembered it being. As far as he could remember, there weren’t any lightswitches. It just was light or it just was dark. While, yes, Virgil kept it dark, he could never remember seeing things in the darkness. It could have been Virgil’s spider if it grew to be the size of a person and fell just outside of human and stood out against the black background. It opened its eyes and stared at him from behind Virgil in the doorframe. Each blink changed its eye color. Its body tensed up, cracked, and jolted as a small glitch lit its face up. 

He took his eyes off of it for one second and it was gone.

_ Am I imagining things? Is it my proximity to Virgil’s room that it is playing tricks on me? Too much time in the Imagination? _

__

__ _ Is there something wrong with me? _

__ “We need to leave.” He was quick, precise, and direct as always. He didn’t take his eyes off of the background.

“What? Why?” Logan completely forgot that Virgil needed a specific reason for things, otherwise he’d begin to overthink and panic.

“W--we need to go through your schedule of tasks. Yes. List of tasks. Down to the minute. We can’t keep anyone waiting. Everything must be in order…” Logan rambled on and continued to stare directly behind him.

“Logan, I’m getting a bit, you know,  _ anxious _ . Mind telling me what the fuck is going on with you?” said Virgil flatly.

He already knew that he was a failed product. Did Virgil really have to rub it in? “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Talk to me, Jesus Christ.” Yelling had never seemed to really affect Logan, and when Virgil yelled this, it didn’t. But that was because Logan simply wasn’t paying attention to it. He was paying attention to Virgil’s eyes. No longer were they the same brown as everyone else. They had been replaced with a harsh indigo glitching in and out of existence. “Logan?”

Whatever Virgil was now vibrated. It crushed the schedules and threw itself out of the doorframe. It felt like a molasses quicksand and grabbed onto Logan’s arms. He thrashed for a way out, but didn’t dare call out. It wouldn’t have mattered because he was back in a dark place.

It now seemed that he would not be waking up anywhere besides on the ground outside of Virgil’s room. There was no time to waste. He had already let this thing win twice. No more.

“You okay there, L?” Virgil was there yet again.

“Not important.”

“Alright then. Nice to see you too,” he deadpanned.

“I am going to be frank and blunt with you,” Logan began, which earned a “when are you not?” as an additional side comment from Virgil. “This is the third time that we have had this discussion. I keep waking up in this same spot, always right about to go over the new schedule plans with you. And each time, something else is with us. Everytime it turns you into some sort of computer virus glitch monster and it kills both of us. I realize that this sounds irrational and illogical, but it is the truth.”

Virgil simply stared at him. His mind rushed back to the onslaught of glitches, its jerky movements and just how easily it overpowered him. When did he get so weak? He was the shrew of the mindscape. On a good day, more intense than a lovesick Roman and a nostalgic Patton combined. And on a bad, he was hell incarnate.

“I don’t even know what to say,” said Virgil slowly.

“That’s perfectly understandable. I need you to believe me--”

“L, I know that the mind is weird and does weird shit all the time, but it can’t conjure fucking Groundhog Day.”

“Obviously. It can’t make it a different day. That doesn’t make sense.” Logan said it so nonchalantly.

“I meant the movie.” Virgil blinked. “But you’re right about it not making sense. I can tell you for a fact that we have never had this conversation before. Maybe just go back to your room and take a break or something. We can do the schedule stuff later, when you’re...better.” 

All he did was whisper an apology and remind Logan to do the four, six, seven breathing exercises as he shut the door. 

It reignited something inside of Logan. No more dying. No more strange glitch creatures. No more anything.

“Fuck,” he yelled as he couldn’t stop his body from jumping.

Except he never came down. He was stuck suspended as the mindscape dematerialized around him and conglomerated itself into a massive glitch staring him down. 

It flicked him and everything went dark.

Logan would need seven more pairs of hands to properly calculate the amount of loops that he continued through. He tried Virgil two more times and it always ended the same way. He could now perfectly predict how each side reacted. Virgil would always suggest that he was just tired and to rest. Patton would always be sympathetic, but ultimately not believe him. Roman would always look like he was holding back laughter and then deny that he was doing so. Janus would always slam the door in his face before he would even get a word out, but do it with the most sickeningly sweet bastardly smile. 

“You okay there, L?” Virgil thought he was so quick-witted. Logan was fucking sick of it. This phrase was burned into his ears.

“Living room. Now. Get the others. It’s important.” While Virgil’s nagging streak preceded him, he was surprisingly compliant.

Logan paced back and forth as the others came rolling in. 

“Logan, is everything okay?” Even now, Patton’s greeting still came.

“Not to sound completely on brand, but you’re scaring me a bit.” Logan simply shot Virgil a glare to get him to shut up.

“Yeah, this is intense even for you.” Roman knew nothing more than how to give the most backhanded of compliments. 

“What does Cassandra have for us this time?” Logan considered throwing Janus into the glitch creature if he had to go through another loop.

Logan looked at them all, motioned for them to sit, and took a deep breath. “What I am about to say is something that I have tried to tell each of you many many times before. You don’t remember it because it hasn’t happened for you, but I have gone through it anywhere from nine to approximately eighty times. Each time I try to do something or talk to you, a monstrous glitch creature, straight out of a computer kills us. I am the only one that it is repeating for and--and I don’t know how to fix it. That is why I am taking a risk and telling you all together right now. I understand that this seems--”

“Ridiculous?” Roman began, “this is fantastical even for me. Make it a little less sci-fi timey-wimey if you want me to believe some tall tale, Logan. Do not go into scriptwriting.”

“Now, Roman. Logan is clearly upset by this.”

While the reaction from Roman was expected, Patton’s emotional intelligence seemed to finally have paid off. “Thank you, Patton.”

“But are you sure that you’re not just spending too much time in Virgil’s room and it’s making you go a bit  _ paranoid  _ (sorry, Virgil!),” he said sweetly.

“I--”

“Seems a little Side Who Cried Wolf to me.”

“Helpful as always, Jay-jay.” Virgil flashed both a smile and a middle finger. Patton had to hold Janus back.

They moved into their own argument with Patton and Roman poorly attempting to keep the peace. Instead, Logan slammed himself onto a chair.

“I am never going to get out of this,” he sighed.

“Hmm. That could be true, but perhaps I may be of  _ ass _ -sisstance.”

He looked up and saw Remus in his nauseating green lowliness leering behind him.

“Oh, I doubt it. This just proves that I’m a hack and a hasbeen,” said Logan. “I have failed all of them because I cannot save them and I have failed Thomas because he no longer needs me and I have failed myself because I am stuck in this loop. And you know what? I deserve all of it.”

The entire mindscape shook with the crack of lightning.  _ That _ got everyone to be quiet. A large hole opened itself in the middle of the room. It grew glitched tendrils that grabbed everyone but Logan and Remus. 

“Logan?” was all they could shout before it sucked them in.

“Shit.”

“Yes.”

From the hole came a giant glitch creature and it rounded on the two it left behind. Logan was ready to let it take him and have him try it all one more time, but Remus pulled him up and they took off.

“The fuck did you do, nerd? I underestimated you.” he said.

“Thank you? And I don’t know. My fucking remote got lost in a crevice outside Virgil’s room and after that I’ve been repeating this seventy-nine times.” Logan didn’t see how this would make running from the giant monster any easier, but Remus kept egging him on.

“Not sixty? Boo. Well, has Mr. Right actually taken that into consideration.”

Logan hadn’t. His own  _ emotions _ distracted him once again. “Where are we going? The corridor can’t go on forever.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. But we have to find the right door first. It’s around here somewhere.” They kept running until they came to a crawl space sized gray door. “Now, the hunk of junk is about sixty-nine inches away (just like something else is). Just wait in here until you figure it out.”

“Several questions,” Logan sputtered. “You actually believed me before it actually showed up? And why are you saying ‘you’ in the singular? Aren’t you hiding in here too?”

“Me? Oh, no, no, no. This is yours now, Logan. If you solve the puzzle, come ask me about it sometime.” Remus grinned. “And of course I believed you. Why wouldn’t I?”

Remus opened the door and shoved Logan inside. The door slammed shut, leaving him in the cold darkness. He tried to open the door, but it was locked. And he heard absolutely nothing.

Dark rooms with doors that locked from the outside were rather annoying, in Logan’s opinion (not that anyone asked for it). He supposed that it came with the territory of being imaginary and wandering around someone’s mind, but that did not make his satisfaction mandatory. He knew that Virgil’s room was dark, the darkest of them all, and he knew this quite well. However, for the life of him, he could not understand why someone would want to stay in a dark room on purpose. 

He sat and he waited. For something, for anything.

God in hell, was Logan bored. No Remus to tell annoying and unnecessary statements, or jokes as he preferred to call them. No light. And only a set amount of time on his hands.

Logan had a plan for everything, or so he liked to perpetuate. All of that came crashing down, however, when the flashlight he brought along went out five minutes ago and he had been going at this for a number of times incomprehensible to humans more than that. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that things went downhill much before that and all he could do was be stuck in remembering just how he got into this mess.

He had tripped just outside of Virgil’s room and flung the remote into a crevice. Virgil was anxiety, the tiny doubts, the paranoia. Everything he had been experiencing. Every thought that consumed him through this entire seventy-nine loops of an expedition. 

He wished he could say that he had no regrets or doubts about himself. He wanted there to be nothing wrong with him. And he wanted all of this to be over. All of it swam inside of him as he heard the glitched white noise get closer and closer. 

Who was he? Why was he even there?

_ Of course I believe you. Why wouldn’t I? _

Remus had said it so instinctually. Like it was natural to trust or listen to Logan. Why would anyone choose to listen to him over anyone else? There had to be someone better.

It dawned on him like the flashlight in the room that had gone out. 

There was no one better. Everyone else was gone.

There was no other Logan. There was no other “logic”. Everyone else was someone different. It had to be Logan. It always had to be him.

Logan stood up and marched towards the door. He smashed the knob off with the flashlight. He bashed the door in.

“I,” he said with a deep breath, “am Logan Sanders. I am Logic. And I am the only one there is. So, you are stuck with me because you aren’t getting another one.”

He stared directly into the space where the eyes glitch version of him should be. It towered over him and came closer, breathing deeply--a beast of doubt and confusion. There was no sign of Remus anywhere.

“I am not perfect. Far from it, in fact,” he continued. “But I have gone through seventy nine loops and there is not a single other side that could have done it. Go on, name one. Try me.  _ I will wait. _

“I am trying and I am enough. Because I am me and I am doing exactly what I need to. I am Logan.”

A small part of him was overjoyed that there was no one left to see a small tear run down his face. 

Once more the entire mind began to dematerialize into a black nothingness. Logan did not see terror or fear this time. He felt only his own breathing.

He awoke to the same ground outside of Virgil’s room as he always had. There was no way to tell if he was out of the loop or not, but he must have. It felt like a weight had been lifted off of his shoulders and out of his eyes.

“You okay there, L?” Virgil said, biting back a small smile.

“I am great. I’m glad to see you, Virgil. We can do the scheduling later. I have some things to attend to first,” Logan said.

“Oh, okay. Have fun, I guess.”

Logan ran to each side (even Janus) and was unable to contain his excitement. There was nothing in the corner of his eye. There was no one following him. Everything was back. He was back.

He finally caught Remus. He hadn’t even considered going to Remus in any of the loops. That was a mistake. If he had learned anything, it was that no one was there for no reason. Everyone brought something; Remus was no exception. “Remus, I have so much to tell you about. Where do I even begin? I don’t even know. I have stories and questions for yo--”

“Woah there. Are you Walt Disney’s head? Because you need to chill.” He said it with a smile.

“Yes, sure. Fine. But thank you for telling me about the gray, dark room. I have thousands of questions about it.” Logan was bouncing off of the walls.

Remus had a very nice smirk. “Now, how did poor little Logan Sanders manage to find out about that?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Eliza for helping me out and reading it over for me!
> 
> Happy holidays, Rain!! You're great!


End file.
